A critical review of local and world news. This blog originally commented on the Moncton Times and Transcript but has enlarged its scope.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Dec. 24:News media, big business and....

Christmas Eve. This is not going to be a religious blog. But it will be religious. (Don't even ask what the difference is.)

On a Christmas Eve when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, my parents, my sister and I were at a Christmas Eve supper in the basement of a small, mission church in the North End of Montreal. Bored and anxious to get home in case there was a present, I slouched over my meal, head and shoulders leaning over the plate.

"Graeme. Sit up straight. Eat your supper like a Christian."

My mother's theology was the grimmest Calvinism from her home in the Scottish highlands. In her view, that habit of the highlands determined what Christianity was. Christians sat up straight when eating. Christians wore neckties to church. Christians put their dishes in the sink after supper

"Aw, mom, this is boring."

She fixed me with the eye of an avenging devil who has found her sinner for the day.

"This is church. Y're dinna her to enjoy y'rsel'."

We all make religion into something we want it to be. Some people insist that Christianity means believing that Mary was a virgin - as it Jesus went around sticking out His tongue at people, and saying "n'ya, n'ya. My mother's a virgin - and your's isn't."

Or they think it's about saving themselves (which seems to me remarkably selfish) so they can spend eternity clapping hands and praising God which, surely, would get both boring and hard on the hands before even the first million years were up.

Actually, religions, almost all of them, make more sense than that. In fact, you don't need to believe in God or Mary's virginity, or Jesus as the son of God - let alone with irrelevant chatter about being born in a manger, and the animals all starting to talk.

Religion is more important than that. It's about how we survive as individuals and as a society. You'll find that in Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinudism, just about any religion you can think of. Love thy neighbour isn't just a fluttery piece of goody-goody. It's necessary for a society to survive. It's necessary for the whole world to survive.

There was nothing arbitrary about the rules of the ten commandments. And it really doesn't matter whether they were written in lightning by God or made up by Moses. Picture Moses. He had a mob out there with no organization, no laws. They weren't going to survive for a month in the desert without rules. A society which accepted murder, stealing, greed simply would not have made it.

Christmas Eve is not (or should not be) about angels and wise men. It's about the code of morals were have settled on so that we can live and survive together. And they are remarkably similar to those of other religions. (Oh. I know. Some religions don't treat their women as nicely as we do. How easy it is to forget that it took us Christians two thousand years to give our women equal status - and they still suffer inequalities and violence. Less than a century ago, it was still legal in Canada for a man to beat his wife.)

The trouble is we confine our morals pretty much to those moments when we're in church, and in occasional outbursts of loving our neighbours - as in turkey drives.

The even bigger trouble is that big business, with all respect an public showings of faith, has hopelessly corrupted our morality. It uses its power to demand lower taxes for itself and lower salaries for employees even as millions suffer. (In the US, one million public school children are now homeless. Guess what their chances in life are.)

In Canada and the US, poverty is rising, especially among children, while the very rich are pulling in record profits.

Big business has, in fact, evolved its own morality, a morality that has no thought whatever of people or of the future. In the new morality, greed is good. Killing for profit is quite reasonable. True, it's a pretty shallow morality. But it's backed up by power, power in the ownership of politicians and in the ownership of news media. Our society and our future are being determined by people who care only for themselves, and are motivated only by greed.

The corruption and the moral rot that big business (with the help of politicians and news media) have spread is destroying American society. With the destruction of any any moral code, with the economic and social abuse of most Americans, with indifference to the suffering that has become so widespread, they have destroyed the United States. And there is no economic need for that. For a small example, tiny Cuba, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, maintains a health system far superior to that of the US. Meanwhile, the US is cutting the miserable and exploitive system that is all it has.

Americans have not yet begun to see the bottom of the hole they have been driven into.

Harper is much in tune with that. He has destroyed most of our environmental protection out of his love for big business and his indifference to the rest of us. He will certainly begin cuts to medicare as soon as possible - and he would dearly love to kill CBC, the only competent and honest news service in the country.

The private news media in New Brunswick are simply propaganda agents for the rich. They mislead, they lie, they hide news. Their job is to set us up as suckers. They don't have even the beginning of a concept of journalistic ethics.

If there is any moral code that governs the Liberals and Conservatives of this province, I would be delighted to hear of it. The best remembered ones have been skilful "fixers" for big business - and have been well rewarded for it.

Even at the city council level, we see it. There is no future. There is only now. And now means launching land purchases and grand schemes that benefit the very rich while - maybe -having small benefits for the rest of us and - certainly - with us taking all the risk.

The corporation bosses, news media, and politicians seem to have no morality whatever,no ambition except to loot. And looting inevitably leads to destruction.

Religion is, or should be a practical matter. Our religions supply us with the moral code we need to survive. It is not something separate from daily life, something that happens only in a place of worship. There are very sound reasons why we should love our neighbour, why we should not kill......

But the rot and corruption an indifference run deep in New Brunswick.

By all means enjoy Christmas Eve. As with other, similar religions, this is an occasion to celebrate a moral code that has served well. Let's make sure we keep that moral code in mind when we judge the business, political and news media leaders of the province.

And don't worry about sitting up straight. That's not part of any religions moral code. The Highland Scots just think that any uncomfortable must be religious. So you just sprawl and enjoy yourself.

2 comments:

I appreciate your fine words as usual Greame, and you're heartfelt sentiment for the world to find a higher moral path as it once may have had.

But time has marched on, and societies' perspectives have evolved as well. Too much water-has passed-under-the bridge between the era of a belief in a God and attending church in a regular fashion, and that of today.

Family breakup wasn't a common theme back then as it is now.(yes- this can be partially blamed on big business's semi-related agendas, and the falling away from a belief in religion)

But, post-war jobs were plentiful. One didn't require a university degree, or two to be successful. One full-time job was usually sufficient to pay the bills in an average family household. And, cancer from cigarette smoking hadn't as yet been proven.

But it's a different world now. The genie is-out-of-the-bottle. The average individual has more information, and does not necessarily wish to return to the indoctrinated forms and ideas that ruled the world for so long. (Religions can be co-opted or corrupted for selfish reasons and human-nature being what it is, will often utilize religion for that purpose).

But, I do acknowledge the good deeds that 'good' religion does, and I'm aware the average person today needs something, and society as a whole needs something, and that something is simply: critical-thinking skills.

As an agnostic-atheist I see the potential in having humanist ideals. In MHO a small amount of critical-thinking education goes a long ways in informing an individual on the difference between right and wrong...

However, a question from another perspective may sound like this: How is the state of Louisiana (for example), different in its attempt to force 'Creationism ' (Intelligent Design) to be taught in their public school science classes, from the suspension of logical thinking as a requirement of religious belief systems overall?

In other words, it's within the realm of possibility the same system that's been responsible since the dawn of civilization for absolving individuals and society of the responsibility of thinking for ourselves (religion) is simply the same, unprovable belief system, and is psychologically conditioned into us, which is inherently and ultimately related to how we've ended up today in such an unthinking mess.

Oh, I wasn't making a pitch for religion or faith.It's true I discovered about ten years ago that I had faith. But I'm not crazy about any doctrine, and have limited confidence in any church.

When I saw the ad for the Irving chapel inviting us to sit there and reflect, it blew my mind. I don't know whether it was hypocrisy or stupidity, but which ever it may be, it's a collector's item.

Indeed, I would guess that most of the people I criticize as immoral would consider themselves to be faithrful and possibly even observant - and would commonly be regarded as such.

We all do seem to have an instinct for what we must do in order to survive. I suppose that could be called logic; I really don't know. And it can, of course, be refined by logic.

And that instinct seems to be universal - which might explain the similarities between major religions.

One of the problems (often, not always) of religion is that it takes us off the track by avoiding the connection of its values to daily life. Or, worse, nit-picking it into idiocies as seeing gays as the great threat to civilization.

you can arrive at morality by faith or logic or that fuzzier form of logic called instinct.The important thing for us is to be some means arrive at some morality and to see the world we live in in that context.

The important thing is to see that our present economic and political leadership is immoral. By logic or faith, they were immoral. And to recognize that that way lies disaster.

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About Me

born into poverty in Montreal. (1933 was a bad year to be born.) Kicked out of school in grade 11. Became factory hand, office boy.
Did a general BA, mostly at night at Sir George Williams University, and partly while a youth worker for YMCA, camps, etc. Then teacher training at McGill.
Taught gradea 7 to 11 for six years. Loved it.
Quit to do MA at Acadia, then PhD (History) at Queen's.
Taught history three years at UPEI, then some 35 years at Concordia U in Montreal.
Loved the teaching. Thought the profs had more pompous and useless asses among then than is really desirable outside a zoo.
work experience:
factory, office,social group work, office,camp director, teacher.
Radio - c. 3000 broadcasts, mostly current events.
TV - many hundred appearances, mostly commentaries.
Film - some writing, advising, voice-overs.
Writing - no count, some hundreds. Some academic, but mostly for popular market, and ranging from short stories to stories to newspaper and magazine columns to history books.
professional speaker - close to 2000.
Awards for the above? yep